


Not Colors

by losselen (zambla)



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist (Anime 2003)
Genre: Gen, Ishbal | Ishval, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-18
Updated: 2014-04-18
Packaged: 2018-01-19 22:28:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1486423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zambla/pseuds/losselen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mustang on dualism, post-series. How do you explain a war? Then how do you explain another war?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Colors

**Author's Note:**

> Written in 2006.

“What did you see?”

“Sand. Red. Not much.”

There are colors you remember and colors you don’t forget. The difference was in doubleness—some are not colors.

Roy remembers crouching afterwards, picking through the cinder, putting his fingers on the palm of a hand, on the fleshy center where the blood would have gathered if it were alive—and there you could see how strong the body was, how bowed the strength in your bones, in the membranes that wrapped your fasciae together, how quickly it becomes ash.

And he, too, tested his body afterwards, pushing through the veins on the insides of his hand when he’d regained fully conscious motion, and the feeling was the same. How much you could trust it, he wasn’t sure—touch or any sense at all, when he wanted to confirm that he still knew what he touched, what he ate, what he killed. For a while after he was shipped back, he was amazed that the city pulsed on, in the absence of pain. When he made up his mind, he was pulsing, too.

*

His technique called for a background in studies of thermodynamics; more than anything you had to know bond construction, the energetic laws that described it; from there you could manipulate combustion and hydrolytic reactions. Physical control required a mental awareness of surrounding oxygen concentrations. In Ishbal the conditions were ideal. Humidity was always near zero and in the desert convection winds were constant.

The first week he was stationed, he saw that the wind was not a whorl as he had thought, but a sheet. A steady laminar flow that lost you the horizon. In the sky the winds were warring. Soldiers were transported in trucks that were not especially designed for the terrain. They found it especially hard to deal with sandstorms. Some would lose their sight. Some would end up with sand in their lungs. Some went hyperthermic, were held down while they vomited because they went into terrible convulsions.

He read these things after the rebellion was over; alchemists didn’t fraternize with the regular military. Anyway they themselves were guarded people. He didn’t know or cared to know much beyond oxygen turnover level, wind data, and the horizon. The conditions were ideal.

*

The glass was falling. Had been falling all day. Summer in Central had days like this, still days. When movement curled into a sphere, and the clouds were low onyx sheets. But you’d wait hours and hours before the storm really hit you. The days were rare—you get caught without an umbrella and go home slinking like a drowned rat on the paved streets, skipping from lee to lee, legs wet to your knees. When it came down the sound was a steady geography, dismantled, fallen laws. Afterwards, the sky was cesious, its stars naked broody lights.

*

When Fullmetal was nervous, you could hear his arm clink. You became of your own hands, what they were doing. Al didn’t hide his anxiety that way because he couldn’t if he wanted to and anyway rarely had any. The sound reminded Roy of how Maes swirled his drink when he was nervous, how ice clinked like little bells.

Maes had a terrible time quitting smoking.

See, he would’ve done anything for Gracia, ridding addictions included, but he was almost unbearable during the first week. Scratched his fingers constantly, the space between the two knuckles where the cigarette would have been, gritting his teeth when he touched the calluses.

Roy has met plenty of people who were willing to rhetorize on will and fate—he’s done it himself—when you see the things he’s seen—the place of the individual in an impersonal grand design. Some questioned the nature of moral responsibility and some left, were eliminated if they knew too much, and most just left fate as contingency and ducked their heads. And he tells himself in the most secret voice that maybe he believes in neither, will nor fate. Could not see a line.

But in what kind of abyss does that leave you, then?

Roy drank when he was nervous. He didn’t smoke, but if he did, he knew his habit would be vicious.

*

The rain clung to her afterward, after he was shot. She used her sleeves to wipe her eyes. You couldn’t see much in that sort of weather.

She carried him all the way back, half ran, half dragged, and drove in the middle of the lanes because she couldn’t see at all. When she made it back she knew that she was calmer—the pulse was there; she knew about keeping what counted.

During the war there were nurses who broke, and she’s seen them when she was in the ward with a fractured arm. They stood frozen with their hands in people’s guts, trying to tell the extent of organ damage. It wasn’t as if a mechanic was contemplating fixing a broken automobile. One stood still with her hands stained, letting the blood run. The man was screaming, and in the oxidized mass of red she saw that most of his insides were ripped open. Bodies are different machines.

Before the injury she was mostly assigned sniper jobs taking out low-rank insurgency leaders. She would have been useless in the last parts of the operation.

There are things that break and won’t return, she knows. The details can be regrown, but the structure has to remain, in the mind and in the body. There are deeper fractures than shattered bones.

*

Roy researched the secrets of the body as well. But he had different things in mind. Organic unity you would liken to something metaphysical, but there you entered anthropocentric formalities that led you nowhere.

*

There are stories that you pass on to your children, because maybe they’d listen. There are other stories that fail in transmission, that are chiasmal because you don’t understand the ending yourself. These stories you won’t even repeat in your head, having lost the important parts that made its tones human. Some were not colors.

*

When the red faded, he remembered blue.

On a stretcher in a make-shift war hospital he saw the burned man who spoke with his hands. His fingers wriggled pink where the flesh was new. He smelled red for ten days, stationed next to the hospital, seeing nothing but terracotta walls and waiting for command—such sallow bronze, such savor of metal, which was red, as red as any.

But there were not colors. Those were whole deserts whose silence failed. Those were objects what were not memory, not even in sleep.

If you went outside, you would see that he remembers blue, after a crest of red when he closed his eyes. Blue was easier, from blue you couldn’t escape. His voice gave suddenly after two months in field command. In the debris were hands. And naked spines. Long elegant bones, each vertebra like a puzzle piece. He saw the hypostyles fracturing in the ancient heat, and long, long stitches where skin should have been, where there was no longer color, no longer the memory of color, and maimed fingers wriggling pink where the flesh was new, where the doctors sewed them together only to have them shaken loose again. His fingers itched in his pockets, and they didn’t know any colors either.

And that was the difference you won’t remind yourself of—the difference between the remember and the not forget.

See, there are hard lessons that taught you these sorts of differences, but there are also harder ones that make you unlearn them, taught you how meaningless words are.

When he is alone, there is no mystery to warfare, but he smiles in the middle, and drops his pencil on his desk.

Nothing special, nothing to say. Marcoh’s eyes had blood in them when he’d found him, and Roy had said, “There is no use reminding yourself what wars is,” and left.

When the red was finished, Roy lost his eye. There were no colors.

*

He found their files years later in Central, reviewing a case regarding a letter to Hohenheim—Rockbells. Rockbells. Both born in Rizembool. Married, eight years. Child, one, female. Voluntary presence. Eliminated as insurgence aides. There were pictures of both, taken for their respective medical degrees, and an intelligence photo of the woman dressing a maimed girl in an enemy camp hidden some miles away from the city—the military raided it two days later—between the high dunes, next to a campfire. There was a blurry veil. He didn’t know if it was the wind and the sand or the hands of the cameraman.

*

There are strands of hair on his pillow and the whiskey burned all the way down. The grass was higher than he thought. Things he kept silent; he discolored them, and they were powerful.

The light was flooding in. He felt warmth on his skin, felt the tight scars that were new. Bodies were important.

The Elrics knew this but it took them four years to prove it.

He remembers when the nature of their quest was met with questioning tones: they said that they were too young and wanted too much. Were they children? There was a time when Roy was young, and he then, too, would have said it was foolish. He would have blamed younger folly. He thought he was invincible, and didn’t know death, and couldn’t touch it. He would have said that there are far more important things than reclamation, that new things would replace lost ones, that some faces are, after all, interchangeable. It didn’t take too much to see that the world was young, too. That humanity was just trying to figure out the rules, like a stubborn toddler flexing its hand that was too big and too strong for its arm, and when it swings it swings too wide, and when it hits it hits too hard.

There are not colors but words.

*


End file.
